Caribbean Beat — May/June 2018 (#151)

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Converstion with Hector
H (2015, acrylic on canvas,
65.3 x 65.3 cm)
Above Tessa Mars at work
in her studio
Above right The artist’s
mother, writer Kettly Mars
Right Tessa Mars’s greatgrandfather,
Jean-Price
Mars
choose to express that is outside of what people
consider the norms, there is potential for [a kind of]
death to come with it, due to misunderstandings or
rejection of what you show to the world.”
It can be a social death, or a very literal death,
the artist says, because you can still die in Haiti
today for expressing political views. She mentions
corruption, and how much easier it is to just go
with the flow than to be critical of things that are
going wrong. She says although everyone knows
about some issues, people are afraid to discuss
them out loud. She notes that although Haitian
politicians of today often try to identify with Haiti’s
heroic past, it can also be a way to avoid talking
about real issues: patriotic discourse can often
mask issues of present-day poverty and misery.
She asks: “What does Independence translate to
for the youth of Haiti right now? Although we are
fighters, many Haitians are fleeing from the island,
fleeing from the first black republic.”
Despite this, Mars feels great pride in her
Haitian identity, and in the proud legacy of
freedom-fighting: Haiti is the only country
in modern times where enslaved people successfully
took their freedom by force, during the Revolution
between 1791 and 1804.
“I was born and raised in Haiti,” says Mars. “I
grew up in Port-au-Prince. I still live in the same
home where I was born, which has been in our family
for multiple generations. I grew up in a family of
thinkers in Haiti, and the family name is associated
with literature.”
Her mother is the celebrated Haitian poet and
novelist Kettly Mars, whose 2010 novel Saisons
Courtesy Tessa Mars
sauvages (Savage Seasons) explores the malevolent
dictatorship of François Duvalier. Meanwhile, the
famous Haitian ethnographer, doctor, politician,
and diplomat Jean Price-Mars (1876–1969), who
championed the Négritude movement in Haiti
and was the first prominent defender of Vodou as
a religion, was Tessa Mars’s great-grandfather on
her father’s side.
“The need to connect with the African/
black part of our cultural heritage was one of the
most important aspects of his legacy for me,” Mars
says, speaking of his influence. “Jean Price-Mars
studied and did research as a scientist, while
my approach is more intuitive. I am interested
in learning more and understanding where the
traditions come from, and their meaning, but I’ve
gone ‘native’ in a way, and I am more interested in
exploring and experiencing them for myself, and
translating this for others through visual means.”
This family heritage profoundly shaped how
Mars grew up, how she saw the world, and how
she chose to become an artist at the age of seventeen.
She credits her willingness to explore and
courtesy haitian history blog courtesy wikimedia
38 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM